16:30
A dialogue on how Romanian creativity can be better recognized, connected and supported, as well as on the conditions necessary to strengthen a sustainable, coherent and internationally relevant creative ecosystem.
Romania needs to become better at recognizing, connecting and supporting the creativity it already has.
Creative Romania proposes the Romanian Creative Week framework as a meeting space to think about culture and creative industries as a living ecology, beyond separate creative sectors: a network of people, institutions, knowledge, skills, markets and territories, whose strength depends on the relationships between them.
Romania needs a cultural and creative ecology in which public institutions, independent organizations, artists, craftsmen, critics, galleries, museums, universities, the business environment, collectors and the public fulfill different but interdependent roles. Cultural policies must create the conditions in which this ecology can function.
Creative Romania thus assumes two complementary functions: as an Observatory and a Laboratory.
As an Observer, it looks closely at the creative landscape in Romania: who produces culture and under what conditions, where and how value is produced, what infrastructures exist, what connections are missing, and how Romanian practices and policies relate to international models and experiences.
As a Laboratory, it brings together the actors who actually create the ecosystem: artists and decision-makers, museum directors and entrepreneurs, craftsmen and designers, critics and economists, private galleries and public institutions, universities, financiers and collectors. Not just to diagnose problems, but to test new models of cultural and creative policy.
Our desire considers a structural question, beyond culture’s contribution to the economy: What conditions allow creativity to become at the same time a sustainable profession, a form of knowledge, a source of innovation, a resource for the development of a territory and an international presence, while preserving culture’s capacity to experiment, to think critically, to preserve memory and to imagine what does not yet exist?
Talks
1. The futures are both handmade and digital. What lies in between?
The future of creativity is neither exclusively technological nor a return to manual labor. It is built in the space between embodied and computational knowledge, material intelligence and artificial intelligence, legacy techniques and emerging tools.
A craftsman reading wood grain, an artist working with an algorithm, a restorer using 3D scanning, a designer experimenting with biomaterials, or a museum digitizing its collection occupy different points of the same continuum between human, material, knowledge, and technology.
What lies between handmade and digital? Knowledge, tools, materials, transmission, authorship, and innovation.
How do we preserve skills without freezing them? How does knowledge circulate between generations and technologies? Why is technological experimentation recognized as innovation, and experimentation with materials, techniques, and traditional knowledge is heritage?
Futures are both handmade and digital. Between them lies a territory that cultural policy still does not fully recognize: the circulation of knowledge between individuals, materials, machines, and generations.
Keynote: Teodor Frolu and Andrei Cozlac
2. Made in Romania. Seen Everywhere. Circulation, export and internationalization
Artists, designers, architects, filmmakers, musicians, craftsmen, galleries and creative businesses from Romania already circulate internationally — but often through individual effort, not through a coordinated infrastructure.
What would a Romanian strategy for the internationalization of the creative sector look like?
From mobility, residencies, exhibitions and fairs to export, international representation, cultural diplomacy, translation, funding and access to networks and markets: how do we move from individual successes to an infrastructure of circulation?
And what exactly do we want to make internationally visible when we say Made in Romania?
Keynote: Andrei Boncea, Producător de film și Președintele Alianței Producătorilor din România și Ioana Ciolanu, Președinte Romanian Fashion Council, Anca Lupeș, Președinte RAW Music & Fondator Mastering The Music Business
3. What can’t be measured? The value of culture beyond the creative economy
To build public policies, we need data. Culture produces jobs, businesses, exports, tourism, investment, and economic value. All of these can and should be measured.
But culture also produces things that escape indicators: memory, experiment, beauty, difficulty, belonging, critical thinking, risk, relationships, and the possibility of imagining something that doesn’t yet exist.
How do we measure culture without reducing its value to what can be counted? How do we demonstrate impact without turning the indicator into a goal? And how do we build public policy that is mature enough to support experimentation, failure, and what doesn’t yet have an audience or a market?
Culture has economic value. But not everything that has cultural value needs to demonstrate economic profitability.